Marblar

Overview

Marblar is a web-startup founded by PhD students Daniel Perez (Oxford), Mehmet Fidanboylu (King’s College London) and Gabriel Mecklenburg (Imperial College London) in 2012, to find new market applications for high-tech inventions.

Marblar utilizes challenge-driven innovation – presenting technologies as competitions and asking the question “What would you do with this technology?”. Marblar’s online community, from over 100 counties, collaborate and compete using the open platform to come up with and build on the best ideas, which are rewarded with online points, badges (marbles) and cash.

This ‘crowdsourcing’ approach to the commercialization of technology allows for brainstorming and the application of latent microexpertise at an unprecedented scale. In the seven months since launching in October 2012, Marblar has found over 1,100 new real-world uses for technologies from leading universities, research institutions and technology start-ups from across the world.

Current Activities

Marblar partnered with The Climate Group in May 2013 to launch the EarthHack competition with the support of IKEA and Philips. The first EarthHack is centered on the home and aims to unleash the power of the crowd to find existing technologies that can be re-imagined for a more sustainable home.

Marblar will work with the competition winner, The Climate Group, Philips and IKEA after the competition, to explore the feasibility of creating a product for the home that will save 1 million tons of CO2 per year by 2020.